Sunday, June 14, 2009

57 Hours of Home-Owning Experience

Well, we have finally closed on the house and have the keys to our home! What a busy weekend it has been. As soon as we put the keys in the door, we went to work!

Friday afternoon after we walked in the door, we instantly took Alex's trusty wonder bar and pried up the carpeting. We knew there would be hardwood floors in the living room, but were unsure of the rest of the rooms. We lucked out on three of the four main rooms!

Saturday morning we were out of bed before 7 am and off to the house! I can't believe how much can be accomplished in a day!

pulled up about 10,000 staples from the hardwood floor with the help of Dad, Sean and Renee

pulled up all of the tack strips

pulled all of the paneling out of the living room and dining room

pulled the peel and stick vinyl squares off of the original tile-work in front of the fireplace. (believe me, I know, who in their right mind would put peel and stick vinyl on tile? In order to give the benefit of the doubt, the tile is in pretty rough shape, some cracks and the grout is deteriorating)

now we just have to figure out how to getthe adhesive off of the tile

But now, the two biggest jobs that made the most impact:

The dining room office *maybe* went from this:

walled up mirror on mirror monstrosity

To this:

And the living room dining room *maybe* went from this:

Weird not original built-in

To this:

wonderful openness!

You can not believe what a difference it makes opening up those two doorways to their original purpose. The house definitely feels much more light and airy and flows so much better!

Much more work ensued over Saturday and Sunday-we pulled and started stripping the baseboard, taped and skim coated one of the ex-paneling covered walls, took all the hardware and doors off of the kitchen cabinets to ready for priming and painting, swept up messes about a million times, pulled tons of nails out of the walls (does paneling really need 100 nails per sheet?), pulled tons of nails out of the baseboard...and now we are ready to collapse. Coming soon....more skim coatingmore paint strippingpainting the walls in the living room, dining room, bedroom, office and kitchenpainting the kitchen cabinetswindows in the bathroom/pantry projectpossibly a bathroom redo... we'll see on this one!...and refinishing the wood floors! all this by the end of the month when our lease is up on our apartment! I'll keep you posted!

*if you can't tell, we are still unsure what the purpose of each room will be!